This article was printed in the New York Times on April 16th, 2009 on page B9 of the New York edition. The article talks about how Quest Diagnostics was convicted of false advertising claims and sentenced to pay back $302 million in damages from the false advertising. In the article this money is divided up to repay many different governmental and state institutions such as Medicaid. These institutions and programs were swayed by this company and bought their product based on their advertisements. As these products showed to be ineffective an investigation was inspired and lead to the realization that these previous promises were false.
This article differs extremely from the common crime stories focused in the New York Times. Although this time of economic despair is surfacing more white collar crime, its still very disproportionate compared to violent street crime that receives much of the news spotlight. White collar crime is a crime that can be very hard to determine the costs and effects of the action. In this story no explaination is given of how the government decided that $302 million would be enough or what it would cover. This is the main reason why its hard to prosequete white collar crime. In the book on white collar crime that we read many crimes were given specific definitions. To me this crime seems to fit into the category of corporation on public. According to the article the company was stealing money from the public through the hands of the leading officials in the company.
A very interesting twist to this story is that there’s actually more than one company involved. Throughout Coleman’s book, The Criminal Elite, there was much haze on how to classify a dual company involved conspiracy. As the past has proved, with Enron, it can be very difficult to prove any individuals guilt in a large scale white collar crime incident. In this new situation I think that it will be even harder to decipher who did what and to punish them appropriately.
Another thing about this article that was very different from most news stories was the absence of individual names. The article only tells of how the company as a whole will be punished. Normally in large scale problems like this a CEO or a president is named to provide the public with some form of imagery. In this case however no names are mentioned which makes the crime seem less personal. To conclude I would like to as a question, this article seemed to be one that only provides momentary outrage which is shortly forgotten while a murder provides outrage that can last a whole persons life, why is this when the costs of this incident may have been more than one life?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/16tests.html?_r=1